Science of the Times: Artificial intelligence still a work in progress

Kenji-san III, the most complex of the Kenji family line of robots, expresses love and passion so intense for humans or any other object it identifies as ‘its lover,’ researchers are now too scared to make the robot public. An unknown complexity in its coding makes its emotional response go beyond that of its programming.

You might remember seeing a story a few years ago about Kenji, a Japanese robot who was programmed to feel emotions and who predictably fell in love with a female researcher.

Poor Kenji had to be shut down after trapping the object of his affections in a lab, where he lavished her with hugs. While heartbreaking, the story — a modern day Frankenstein in 500 words or less — was sadly just as true as Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, and obviously so.

If the same narrative were to surface 10 years from now, though, you might not dismiss its authenticity so quickly. Programming is progressing at such a rapid pace these days that the Emoti-Bot 5000 just might be stepping out of the realm of science fiction within our lifetime.

Take Eugene Goostman, for instance, a “chatbot” that was recently heralded for (allegedly) passing the Turing test. Named for famed British computer scientist Alan Turing, a driving force in mathematics and theoretical computer science, the Turing test is a benchmark for artificial intelligence that pits man against machine.

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Turing, perhaps best known for his work in cracking the German code cypher during World War II, believed artificial intelligence would become so advanced by the year 2000 that a robot would be able to fool 30 percent of judges into believing they were speaking with another human during a five-minute conversation.

(Incidentally, Turing’s homeland was so impressed by his many contributions to the sciences that it decided to honor him in 1952 by putting him on trial for homosexuality. He died two years later in what is thought to be a suicide. The Brits, realizing how atrocious this was, quickly apologized a scant 57 years later and finally offered a full pardon in 2013.)

Anyway, Goostman, posing as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, was reportedly able to fool 10 out of 30 judges, thus exceeding the 30 percent threshold. As writer and software engineer David Auerbach noted in a piece on the dubious achievement last month, Turing probably never intended that arbitrary figure to be the determiner of computer “intelligence,” but the news was nonetheless met with hyped media reports, as well as a fair amount of not undeserved criticism.

See, the problem with Goostman and its kin is that they don’t really emulate or exhibit “intelligence,” so much as they attempt to evade detection. You could tell the program you are a plumber and it might respond, “Oh, a plumber, how fascinating!” This is a lie on several levels, of course, not the least of which is the word “fascinating.” The bot here simply plugged what it recognized as a profession into a sentence that was mathematically likely to be appropriate. But misspell the word plumber or tell it you are currently employed as a Hatfield Brand Breakfast Sausage and the bot will likely be completely thrown.

Which is not to say that all work on artificial intelligence is bogus, just that chatbots at this point probably couldn’t convince a dog to chase a ball (Auerbach questions the intelligence of the judges in these cases rather than that of the machines).

Much of the heavy lifting right now is taking place at tech giants like Google and Microsoft, which are working to build a better positronic brain through “deep-learning” systems. Microsoft’s recently unveiled Project Adam, for instance, is reportedly twice as good at recognizing images than prior systems because of a unique data-gathering program that allows multiple inputs across a vast neural network to each write information at the same location — thus using less computing power to provide faster, more accurate results.

There is also a program called The Painting Fool that does as advertised. It achieves this by developing a “mood,” which it gleans from online news sources, then painting something based on how it is “feeling.”

If the Fool has read “good” news stories about local charities and puppies, for instance, it might select a quality such as “light” or “airy” to influence its style. “Bad” news stories might result in darker themes or even outright refusal to paint anything at all.

A researcher with Sony Computer Science Laboratories is meanwhile turning to another art form and trying to coax machines into composing new, novel pieces of music, while a Ph.D. student at Imperial College in London is reportedly handing over complete creative control on a videogame to an AI named Angelina.

Maybe the best AI story I’ve seen recently comes from Dr. Tom Murphy, whose paper (and yes, this is the real title) “The First Level of Super Mario Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic Orderings and Time Travel ... after that it gets a little tricky,” explores teaching a pair of computer programs called “learnfun” and “playfun” how to play classic Nintendo games.

Alongside those stories, Kenji’s own tale of woe might seem a little less far-fetched, but are any of these really examples of “intelligence,” or are they all just cleverly disguised “if/then” scenarios?

Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it? Because what we’re really getting down to here lies in that strange realm of the extant but intangible. I know that I have thoughts (quite a few, actually) that emanate from various neurochemical interactions taking place inside my brain — but whither the thoughts themselves?

This is where the disciplines of science and philosophy converge, which obviously gets a little weird. Nonetheless, people much smarter than me who actually work with AI systems are convinced there will be true artificial intelligence within 15 years.

We’ll have to wait and see how close to the mark they are on that one (even accepting Goostman’s triumph as true, Turing was off by 14 years, after all).

But in the meantime, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome our new robot overlords and to offer my services in any sort of breeding program or zoo setting that might emerge from the coming war on humanity.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Alex Rose covers the Delaware County Courthouse for the Daily Times. Follow him on Twitter at @arosedelco. Check out his blog at delcoscience.blogspot.com. Email him at delcoscience@gmail.com. His column appears every Tuesday.

About the Author

Alex Rose covers court proceedings for the Daily Times. He also writes a weekly science column. Reach the author at arose@delcotimes.com
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